2009 Asian Science Camp

August 2-8, 2009
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, JAPAN

Ph.D, Director of Gunma Astronomical Observatory, Former director of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. His research area is celestial dynamics. He is known by Kozai Mechanism, which describes originally orbits of asteroids, but now is being used in the study of galaxy collision and exoplanets.

In 1609 Galileo observed Jupiter, Moon, the Milky Way and the sun by his small refracting telescope. Then larger refractors appeared and in the 20th century large reflecting telescopes were constructed and the structure of the universe has been studied. Now 8m class reflectors including Subaru Telescope are very active. For radio astronomy interferometer systems with high angular resolution have been developed. And together with data secured by infrared, x-ray and gamma ray telescopes a new idea has been introduced

It is known that atmosphere of Venus and Mars consists of mostly carbon dioxide, whereas that of the earth contains only small amount of carbon dioxide but much oxygen. We want to discuss how such differences have been produced among the three neighboring planets.

Just after the general theory of relativity was published by Einstein in 1915 the deflection of light near limb of the sun and the motion of the perihelion of Mercury were the two important evidence of the theory. Now there are many other data which could be explained only by the general theory of relativity and one of them is the effect of gravitational lens. We discuss here this effect as well as the motion of neutron star binaries.